Spring Math Flowers

Today seems like a fabulous day to bring Spring inside, since of course it is anything but Spring outside! We are going to full on pretend it is sunny and warm with these Spring Math Flowers. Such a simple idea with tons of space for getting creative. Here is my original post about this fun math craft. Hope you like this idea!

Since Madeline has been at home learning with us, my preschooler Sam has really taken to doing “work”. He has always been my playful and wild child – but with his fourth birthday only a couple of months away, I have noticed a shift. While he is still certainly a boisterous and busy child, he has also developed a determination and concentration with activities he is interested in.

The other day Sam announced that he would like to learn to count to 13. I said no problem, asked him to count, and he sailed right on past 13. When I told him he already can count that high, he said he really wanted to know the numbers to 13 – and thought he should do some “work” on them. Besides this being adorable, it’s actually true. Little ones can often count quite easily, but one-to-one correspondence (which I talk about over in our Playful Preschool Math Curriculum Post) can be tricky. This spring math flower activity is great for practicing one-to-one correspondence.

To prepare this activity, I simply cut out some circles (for flower centers) and some small oval-ish shapes (for petals).
First, I chose five numbers that Sam sometimes has trouble recognizing, and wrote the numeral on the circles and glued them to a piece of paper.
Then, Sam glued the flower petals around each center. He first identified the number and then used one to one correspondence to count and glue the correct number of petals around the centers.

As I mentioned yesterday on our How Wee Learn Facebook Page – this activity can be easily extended for kids of all ages!  These spring flowers could be used for sight words, addition/subtraction facts, multiplication/division facts – even fractions!  Here is how we did this activity with my daughter.  We chose some multiplication numbers she was having trouble with as our centers.  She then added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided to get the numeral in the center.

I find having very open ended activities like this, activities that can really be taken in any direction, are wonderful for homeschooling.  I can shape the activity as we go, depending on who is interested.

And that truly depends on the day … hour … minute?

Happy spring friends! Thank you for reading.